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Masai Ujiri building on hope with Giants of Africa: Arthur

When the film was shown the first time, during that Arctic all-star weekend, it felt like the entire NBA was in town. Masai Ujiri was the headliner, glad-handing and chatting with the other luminaries of his professional world like the confident politician he can be but, underneath it all, his stomach was leaping and jittering. Afterwards, he shook hands and embraced friends and accepted compliments, seeming at ease. But he was still shaking inside.

“Honestly, I’m not nervous about anything I do with the Raptors,” Ujiri says from Angola, where he is the camp director for the NBA’s Basketball Without Borders camp, after nearly a month spent running his own camps for his charity, Giants of Africa.

“I’m nervous about everything I do with Africa. You almost want it to go good all the time, and you don’t want to disappoint.”

The general manager of the Toronto Raptors cares deeply about his day job. But he feels he has more control in the NBA. He has also spoken about how if he is the only African-born general manager in NBA history, then he will have failed in some way, and about how much responsibility he feels to the kids who remind him of himself. Ujiri has just finished his annual charity tour, which has been running for 13 years now. When the Hubert Davis-directed documentary was shot last year, Giants of Africa ran basketball camps in four countries. This year they started in Senegal, then went on to Ghana, his native Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda, and Botswana. They helped build a court in Rwanda. It was a good trip.

“So much fun,” he says.

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The program has helped point almost 200 young men towards university in either the United States or Nigeria. It is a small thing, in a vast continent, but you control what you can control. It has grown: There are 11 travelling coaches and staff, and as the documentary showed, there are complications. Then, it was a gym in Nigeria that wasn’t open when it was supposed to be, among other difficulties. Ujiri got angry — “this country is bull----,” he said in a fury, his heart out in the open.

This year it was the country-specific Nike gear for the camps, which arrived late or got hung up in customs. Ujiri knows the gear matters a lot to the camp kids, and he estimates he spent up to $30,000 trying to secure it on time — sending people to fetch shipments, getting new apparel made and sent overnight, whatever it took. Nike is apparently going to help cover the extra costs.

“All the issues we show in the documentary are real issues,” Ujiri says. “But I feel that I don’t want people to look at Africa and say, ‘This is how they do it,’ because there are some things that are really progressive.

“It’s not always the gym isn’t open, it’s not always that the floor is not ready, it’s not always those things.”

He sees great improvements in Africa — in real estate, in business, in all sorts of ways. But he sees what’s left to do, too. He doesn’t want people to see Africa as a hopeless place. The whole point of Giants of Africa, built year after year, is the idea of hope.

“I don’t know that I can do more than this,” Ujiri says. “I have to figure out a way to get smart — not smart, creative — with how I do them. You know, one of the fun parts is travelling as a group, doing it together. The only thing I could change is splitting (staff) up. Sometimes I feel funny: How would we split up and do four countries at the same time, two countries, rather than just doing one and hopping to the next place? You’d need more. You’d need to build a little bit more. We thought about changing countries, like going into new countries, doing it every second year, going into war-torn places, going places we can make a difference.

“There are limits. I wish I could go to more countries, but I can only do so much. I wish I had more time, but there’s only that period in August that I have. I wish I could get more kids in camp, but no, I can do only 50, because there are only two basketball gyms in most of the places, or four maximum. I wish I could do 100 kids in each camp, but I can’t. There’s so many things that you wish you could do better, but you can’t.”

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He would like to go to the Congo next year, and to do something with Luol Deng in South Sudan. There are parts of Nigeria where the terrorist group Boko Haram operates that he would deeply like to help, if he can. He half-jokes that he can’t tell his wife or his parents if he tries it. He is not sure what can be done. But, hope.

In the documentary, at one point, Ujiri says, “Our continent is going to be great. I just hope I’m alive when it is.” The film, at least, is about to finally get a wider release. It will play at TIFF, Toronto’s internationally renowned film festival. Ujiri will be there, surely, smiling and shaking hands. He will be nervous that night, too.

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